Online Class TuneUp: The Ultimate Holiday Gift Guide Pitching Guide

Publicity in a magazine's Holiday Gift Guide is one of the meccas of PR for most businesses. How do the magazines find all of those amazing products to recommend to you?

We'll tell you the secret...are you ready? Business owners just like you emailed an editor about their amazing products - that's how! And now you're going to learn how to do it, too.

Here's your first hint at this Holiday Gift Guide mystery: the magazines are actually putting them together in July. That's right - in the most boiling hot time of summer. You might have been pool-side all this time, but this year, you're going to be carving out time to be at your computer, researching which media contact is the best fit, and then writing that email to email it in.

PS: Tin Shingle collates a database of Media Contacts for our All Access Pass members to search through at any time. So when you're ready, check them out. They will save you time in your research.

This Training TuneUp will show and tell you the ways of how Holiday Gift Guides work in magazines and on TV for the local stations. We teamed up with Sabina Hitchen, founder of Press For Success and a certified educator. She is a former high school teacher turned PR agency owner who now dedicates her gift for teaching to small business owners through her PR Prep School. In this TuneUp, your host and owner of Tin Shingle, Katie Hellmuth Martin, interviews Sabina for all of the juicy details of how to get your business featured in the end of the year holiday gift guides.

Sneak Peek!

Here's a little taste of what you're going to see during this class, the Training TuneUp.

Online Class TuneUp: PR Planning for April

In this class, we discuss 3 time sensitive ways to pitch the media this month. A big part of getting PR is emailing the right editor about it at the right time.

National Magazines

These editors and writers work in an alternate universe. They work in the future. When it's April, they are literally on a beach testing 6 Ways to Sooth a Sunburn to share for a summer fun issue. We show where the magazines are in their cycles, according to their Editorial Calendars that they make public. We go out and get them and make them available to All Access Members of Tin Shingle (see our full collection here).
Lead Time: 3-6 months in advance. If you want to make it into the big glossy magazines, you need to pitch them with ideas 3-6 months in advance. This class explores ideas that will be eligible if you pitch them in April, as they will pertain to  July, August, and September.

TV + Blogs + Some Regional/Local Magazines

Producers and bloggers are always looking for ideas and visuals. Television needs to show a person delivering expertise or a great story, and bloggers need to dazzle their readers with pictures.
Lead Time: 1-2 months in advance

Blogs + Social Media + Websites + Timely Topics

Bloggers can have shorter lead time to get a blog up, but more and more, they do require advance notice. Readers of social media, however, are responding right now. You want to get in front of them. Additionally, if a major movement is happening in the news, you want to ride that wave with an article of your own published on your own blog.
Lead Time: 1 week in advance

Normally the story angle deadlines are available to our Media Contacts and Editorial Calendar Level 4 Membership. But during this PR Planning class series, we share with you some of these deadlines. Get in the class today and you'll hear them, and/or activate your Level 4 Membership to access these and more any time you want.